Who’s behind the Portuguese magazine?

18 januari 2006 About our Sponsor

The Portuguese Institute for Books and Libraries (Instituto Português do Livro e das Bibliotecas) – known as IPLB – is a government agency under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture. Its aim is twofold: 1) to define and coordinate an integrated non-school book and public library policy in Portugal, and 2) to promote Portuguese and Portuguese-African literature abroad.

To promote the works of Portuguese authors and African authors writing in Portuguese abroad, the IPLB:

- Funds translations into foreign languages (deadline for the annual contest is the 31st March *)
- Subsidizes the publication of children’s books and comic books abroad (deadline for the annual contest is the 31st May *)
- Subsidizes publication in Brazil (deadline for the annual contest is the 30th November *)
- Offers financial support for the participation of authors in international festivals, book fairs and other literary events
- Produces and distributes the literary magazines Sights from the South and Portuguese Children’s Books as well as other materials with information on Portuguese literature
- Provides information for publishers, literary agents, translators, etc
- Is present at international book fairs (London, Paris, Bologna, Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo and Frankfurt)
- Gives financial and/or technical support to institutions and projects concerned with Portuguese writers and themes related to Portuguese literature

* Application forms and detailed information are available at the website.



About the Editor and Translators

Richard Zenith, Editor and Translator
Born in Washington DC in 1956, he has lived in Colombia, Brazil, France, and – since 1987 – in Lisbon, Portugal, where he works as a free-lance writer, translator, and researcher in the Fernando Pessoa archives. His Fernando Pessoa & Co. – Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998) won the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and was followed, in 2001, by The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (Grove). In 2001 he also published a new translation of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Penguin). He has rendered many other Portuguese and Brazilian poets into English, as well as novels by Portugal’s António Lobo Antunes and Angola’s José Luandino Vieira. His own poetry appears in American literary reviews, and in Portugal he has published short stories, including a collection titled Terceiras Pessoas (2003). But he hasn’t managed to publish the two novels he has written, nor finish the other two that he started with the usual enthusiasm.

In 2004 Zenith took over as editor of the Portuguese domain of Poetry International, a task he carries out in consultation with the Portuguese Book and Library Institute.


Alexis Levitin, Translator
Born in New York, he is a long-time English Professor at the State University of New York (Plattsburgh), but his real passion, professionally speaking, is translating poetry. After receiving his Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1971, he spent several years teaching at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, in Florianópolis, Brazil. He began translating Brazilian literature in 1974, but soon became more focused on Portuguese poetry. In fact he has made some 25 trips to Portugal, very often so that he could work directly with Eugénio de Andrade and other poets.

Levitin has published ten collections of Eugénio de Andrade’s poetry in translation, including the recent Forbidden Words: The Selected Poetry of Eugénio de Andrade (2003). He has rendered many other Portuguese poets into English, including Sophia de Mello Breyner, Alexandre O’Neill, and Herberto Helder. His other books include Guernica and Other Poems of Carlos de Oliveira (Guernica Editions, 2004) and Landscape Being Born: The Selected Poems of Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão (Green Integer Press, forthcoming). Levitin, whose translations have appeared in well over 200 magazines and in over thirty anthologies and textbooks, has won various prizes and grants in support of his work.